> geofences

Geofences are a great way to start copyright reform. Bobby from Zambezia downloaded your new X-heroes movie, and you're complaining about piracy losses? How can you claim losses, if you're geofencing your content and don't want Bobby's money?!

I think having exclusive distribution rights within geographies is one such usecase for geofencing. This is why Netflix et al may have content available in some zones but not others.

There are all kinds of different legal rights owing to differences in copyright law, contract law, court cases, the medium in question, etc. such that even if one rights holder gave out worldwide distribution rights, inevitably some local difference will require geofencing.

Example: a famous {musician, artist, author, etc.} dies. His heirs dispute who owns the rights to his work.

Courts in Country A give Heir A exclusive rights, but Country B gives Heir B those same rights. Other countries give both of them part ownership.

Worse, a backup drummer / ghostwriter / etc. gets some rights by law in Country C due to a quirk in their local laws.

Now a hypothetical Netflix has to negotiate with different parties in different countries.

This is a mess all on its own.

Add on decades of trading around rights on a per-country basis (or even per time period, per medium, etc.) as part of deals, and it's intractable.

At one point I worked on software to record this kind of thing. It certainly was eye opening, to say the least. Needing to capture legal disputes was an important feature...

Well yeah, but you can't claim piracy-related losses, if people in those regions are unable to buy the stuff you're not selling to them.

The Internet is too global/ubiquitous (except in evil shitty countries like North Korea, China) to make dividing content availability by region realistic in the long run.

Given the amount of money and effort going into these constraints today, one must concede that simply isn't true. There will always be an effort to constrain distribution of media because that is how the moguls keep rich.

It didn't work for DVD regions, so why on earth should it work for geo IP's???

The mind boggles!

Imagine an immaculately-formatted legal brief, complete with citations, that consists entirely of the phrase "fuck you" repeated indefinitely.

That's all the reasoning they need.

Offer a mail-order service for a billion dollars! Then, you're losing a billion dollars for every download.

Issue is that geofencing sometimes a direct results of different laws in different countries.

Well, Bobby should have thought of that before he so nastily stole from a massive corporation! Why would it be their fault, they didn't want Bobby to watch the movie, because let's face it, Bobby's a bit of an ass.

It is always amusing to see free marketeers complaining about getting free marketed.

Just like the fact that Hollywood got its start because the film studios moved out west to get out of the reach of Edison's lawyers when it came to his patents on film technology.

It's hypocritical turtles all the way down.

The hunted becomes the hunter. The victim becomes the oppressor. The hero lives long enough to see themselves turn into a villain. Etc.

A transferable monopoly given to artists as a reward for their creation is very capitalist, but I'm not sure you could call that "free market".